Advantages
The molten salt reactor offers many potential advantages:
- Inherently safe design (safety by passive components and the strong negative temperature coefficient of reactivity).
- Using an abundant supply of thorium to breed uranium-233 fuel.
- Much cleaner: as a full recycle system, the discharge wastes from the reactor are predominately fission products, most of which have relatively short half lives compared to longer-lived actinide wastes. This can result in a significant reduction in the containment period in a geologic repository (300 years vs. tens of thousands of years).
- The fuel's liquid phase not only allows for fission products to be separated easily from the fuel, but also from each other, which allows for some of the potentially useful fission products to be collected and sold.
- There is no need for precise fuel rod manufacturing
- Since the reactor operates at atmospheric pressure, there is no need for a pressure vessel
- Can "burn" some problematic radioactive waste (with transuranic elements from traditional solid-fuel nuclear reactors).
- Possible even in small, even 2–8 MWth or 1–3 MWe. Submarine or aircraft size is possible.
- Can react to load changes in less than 60 seconds (unlike "traditional" solid-fuel nuclear power plants).
Read more about this topic: Beryllium Moderated Reactors
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